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Reference Framework for Sustainable Cities- RFSC

Conclusions & Recommendations by the MS/I Working Group; the today challenge for European cities and towns

Authors: European Working group 2010

INTRODUCTION The today challenge for European cities and towns

What is the context and setting for the project?

In May 2007 the European Ministers responsible for urban development signed the “Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities” with the aim to improve the policy setting for integrated urban development, with a particular focus on deprived communities.

In November 2008, in Marseille, they called for the application of the charter by setting up a concrete operationnal tool for implementation of the sustainable urban development, for the cities and with the cities. They also wished to increase the focus on climate change in recognition of its rising importance.

Today we face the additional challenges of a gloomy economic forecast, and long-term growing pressures on public budgets. Such changes in emphasis are natural and must be accommodated.

But what is the perspective as seen by the city?

Today, more than 70 % of the European citizens live in urban areas. And cities are complex organisms. They are all different. Yet they face similar challenges. There are literally thousands. And they are growing. Both in number and population.

On the one hand, cities are one of the greatest assets held by Europe’s citizens, as they are the motors for the socio-economic development of Europe. They are important levers for economic growth and producers of knowledge, innovation and culture. They offer to their citizens spaces of creation and exchange of knowledge, wealth, cultures, and the opportunity to “live together”.

Historically, the traditional model of the European cities and towns -compact, diverse and complex - has contributed to their economic efficiency, environmental quality and social cohesion, as well as for the creation of interesting urban landscapes and rich architectural and cultural heritage, which both functional and creative at the same time.

On the other hand, cities are currently facing many challenges: They have to adapt to: macro trends such as economic changes (globalisation as well as the financial and economic crisis), demographic, social and cultural evolutions (ageing, immigration, risk of poverty, etc), environmental challenges (preservation of resources and climate change), etc. They also have to address the needs and expectations of their residents, companies and social stakeholders that often prove to be contradictory.

Moreover, they have to take into consideration the needs of all the service users, even those who do not necessarily live within their administrative borders, but who still use them either occasionally or regularly.

City leaders have to master the complex task of handling multiple, often conflicting, decisions on very diverse issues. They compete with other cities in order to attract the best talents, to develop their economies, to deliver resilient communities and economies, and to create places of great quality for their inhabitants and visitors. Especially in today’s knowledge society where people become more and more mobile and demanding, competition is very important.

In order to deal with such complex tasks, cities need efficient tools. Such tools have to give answers to questions such as:

  • How to share experience and learn from each other best?

  • How can cities best cooperate in order to give rise to a well balanced territorial development?

  • How can they apply diagnosis, operational and assessment tools that can be shared between the elected representatives, their technical departments, professional bodies, and their citizens?

To tackle all these issues, a change is needed in our societies, our economies, our behaviours, and our technologies. This means that the path towards sustainability of the European City is a long term challenge which implies that we have to avoid the risk of looking only at the short term worries of the present or the deep economical crisis, reviewing the foundations of urban sustainability and using the occasion to pick up those old challenges that cities have been facing for centuries. The cost of inaction is high, and we have to start as soon as possible, because the next years will be crucial to curb the curve and to reverse some current developments, especially in relation with some environmental issues like climate change.

In this context it is important to work in an integrated way, overcoming sector approaches and developing new urban governance processes that includes and coordinates different administrative levels, stakeholders, citizens and all the relevant actors of urban policies.

In addition the implementation of public policies aimed at the sustainable development of the European cities cannot be achieved without an adequate evaluation of their costs, the possible forms of economic support available to the public authorities and their impacts.

Without doubt these are important challenges, which have to be reckoned not as a constraint, but as a historic opportunity to address –on the basis of a collective consensus- a complete change of paradigm, decoupling growth from energy and resources consumption, and redirecting the European city into the search for a greater sustainability following the perspective of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy.

Over the years a common vision has emerged throughout Europe calling for more sustainable cities, where we “balance and integrate the social, economic and environmental challenges and meet the needs of existing and future generation”1.

However, are the existing processes for doing so most efficient and effective? Our thesis is that this is not so. The dialogue between stakeholders has to be improved. Yet it is rather expensive to set up. It is also not as structured as it could be: or where it is, it is perhaps focused on a specific theme or profession. The need today is to understand the inter-play between these. To know how actions in one specific field, like physical development, will have an impact in others: like societal well being, economic return, or environment. An integrated holistic approach is more and more vital. We know that for any system to be optimised it takes increasing levels of understanding about the impact of a change in one area to another. They need a framework and tools to support the dialogue.

There are many tripwires here too. Structural disfunctionalities. Big and small ‘P’ politics. Resource and capacity constraints. Large, and perhaps more particularly small towns and medium-sized cities require all the help they can get. They need to use quality tools to do their jobs. Modular tools that are relevant and useful. They all have some sort of tools, but are they always efficient, and how do they find out where to find new and better ones? Building on the existing ones that have proven to be successful therefore makes much sense.

So, it is in the context of these Ministerial commitment and the actual needs of cities that this project was launched. It is supported by France following the French EU Presidency in 2008.

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